With the rise in popularity of the Internet, many have attempted to collect, dispense, and store information. Others engage in processes to transact business using the Internet. However, such “online” transactions suffer from many of the same deficiencies as do face-to-face transactions, many relating to lack of independent or objective information. The main difficulties in both current attempts to conduct online transactions and face-to-face transactions arise from the difficulties in locating and contacting a buyer or seller, presenting sufficient objective information, and evaluating the fairness of the terms in a transaction. Online transactions suffer from the additional difficulties arising from their long-distance and anonymous nature. Thus, the ability to make a subjective evaluation of information, especially objective information, is virtually absent.
In online transactions, a buyer is faced with the difficulty in finding a seller. The Internet includes millions of websites. A search for a product will typically include a search of these websites using a search engine. Given the enormous number of websites, a user may need to examine many websites providing hits on key words, and thereby purporting to relate to or provide what a user wants. The reality is a lot of detailed pouring over clutter before finding what it is the user in fact wants.
Furthermore, each website must typically be navigated, with a user moving from webpage to webpage in order to find a product. Ready access to or comparison of the specifications, meaningful characterizations, standard comparisons, and valuation parameters of products, and the terms of sales is even more difficult. Typically, a buyer must be already committed financially, or to the effort of going through multiple steps of filling out forms, providing shipping information, providing financing information, and the like, before actually discovering how much a purchase from a particular online vendor will ultimately cost.
For the seller, the Internet creates enormous difficulties in marketing products. A seller must compete with a host of other websites to be noticed by a buyer. In a some cases, a buyer may be presented with hundreds of links to competing websites presented typically ten to twenty five at a time to the buyer by a search engine. A buyer may typically only look at perhaps the first few groups of links. Accordingly, a seller not placed in the first groups of links by the search engine may never be noticed.
The principal weakness of this process is that factors that may make a seller a more desirable than others do not determine whether the seller will be displayed first to a user. Important factors such as condition, features, price, shipping costs, reliability, and the like must then be evaluated by a conscientious buyer through tedious navigation of the multitude of disparate websites, each displaying what is programmed to promote, and often leaving out equally significant weaknesses or lacks.
In some cases, there may be “bots” or “spiders” that keep track of prices of the same or equivalent products at various on-line vendors, including the price of shipping. However, these also suffer from difficulties. For example, they often (but not always) do not know the availability of the product at the various sites. If sold out at a site, one cannot find out until going to the site. There is often a multitude of sellers, only shown 10 or 20 at a time, which can only be sorted by various rudimentary criteria such as price.
However, the listing of sellers still leaves one bewildered and conflicted because one typically does not want to automatically choose the vendor with the lowest price. It is often a small unknown site that may disappear before delivery of the buyer's order. Accordingly, reliability is far from certain. In some cases there are user-ratings for these various vendors. These are easily manipulated by unscrupulous vendors and still will not protect against those fly-by-night vendors.
The online embodiment of the auction likewise presents many difficulties to a user. In an auction type online transaction, each product, regardless of similarities to others, is listed separately. Furthermore, a conscientious buyer wishing to compare prices must look at each separate listing of products. Comparison is further made difficult by the fact that a buyer may not readily compare prices of products for auction since the final price is only determined when the auction for a product is concluded.
The process of bidding on items in an auction itself introduces difficulties. The emotional aspect of an auction with its competitive and urgent bidding up of the price tends to override prudence and provides no assurances that the price one pays is fair. Furthermore, when there are multiple auctions for the same or very similar products, the buyer often feels compelled to bid in more than one auction. One may end up winning multiple auctions and buying the same product several times.
Another problem with auctions is that of comparing shipping costs across auctions. Yet another problem is the time-sensitive nature of the auction. The transaction is completed according to the seller's timetable and not the buyer's. This limitation is a disservice to the buyer who must often wait several days to see if a purchase will go through.
Both auction-style transactions and “retail”transactions through merchant websites suffer from the uncertainty and potential for fraud. The risk stems from the remoteness and anonymity of the parties to the transaction. A party has no guarantees concerning the integrity of the other party to the transaction. Disputes arising from a transaction must take place over the internet. Not knowing the identity of the other party, one can be hard pressed to enforce any obligation against the other party.
This uncertainty limits many potential buyers to a few major vendor websites, which may or may not have the best prices and overall quality of service. Thus the purchasing process (or the market itself) is inefficient due to the presence of these major vendors who command greater market share despite questionable prices and service.
The remoteness of the transaction also adds uncertainty to the transaction costs of purchasing a product. A conscientious buyer who finds a seemingly low purchase price may find upon consummation of a transaction that the overall costs of the transaction, due to costs of shipping, were in fact less favorable than a buyer thought.
Other unanticipated costs include the cost of fraud to the buyer, seller, or both. For example, a user eventually must bear the cost of a vendor' so called “fraud prevention program.” Comparison of overall costs of a transaction may in fact be very difficult to ascertain. A user must proceed through the many steps comprising the process of buying online before ever knowing the overall cost of the transaction.
Another difficulty occasioned by the online nature of the transaction may include the costs of transferring funds. A seller may be required to accommodate various types of funds transfer mechanism, such as various online escrow services, several credit card institutions, checks sent by mail, and the like. The various funds transfer mechanism may also include costs to the seller and create difficulties for the collection of funds owed to the seller.
Additionally, many auction sites allow the seller to limit the payment options. This limitation can inefficiently confine the market place of potential buyers. Sometimes, a buyer may be surprised to discover at the end of the auction that he is not allowed to pay with a credit card.
Another disadvantage of the current state of the art in online auctions is the fact that it is very difficult for a buyer to assess the fair value of a product because of the lack (or poor quality) of market history, comparable product data, comparable price data, lack of tools for price evaluation, or the like.
In view of the foregoing, what is needed is a system of applications and software support that readily provides information collection, processing, presentation, searching, and mathematical or context manipulation and comparison needed by a buyer and a seller. What is further needed is an application that streamlines the process of conducting online transactions. Such an application should allow a buyer and a seller to readily assess the overall cost of a transaction.
It would be an advancement in the art to provide an application that enables disputes to between buyers and sellers to be resolved efficiently. Such an application in hardware, software, or both should assess the risk of fraud or nonperformance for each party to the transaction. The costs to a party to the transaction for such an application should be based on the risk of fraud or nonperformance that the party poses.
It would be a further advancement in the art to provide a system to collect, disseminate, and otherwise provide relevant information to a consumer buying products and sellers marketing products using that system and its software applications standard factors for comparing. Relevant information may include data describing the current market for a product and the quality or functionality of a product. It would be an advancement to invite, collect, and process contributions of such information from users and previous transaction records. Such a system should provide objective evaluation of the accuracy and veracity of contributions from users and display only reliable information to subsequent users.
It would further be an advancement in the art to streamline the information presented to the buyers and sellers to present a market more easily accessible as well as easier to analyze.